Civil society and trade unions have produced a joint submission in response to a call for inputs to the work of the Ad Hoc Committee to Draft Terms of Reference for a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.
Tax Justice
In order to address tax evasion and harmful tax practices, and to increase cooperation and transparency, a global binding framework to tackle these issues is needed.
What is it?
Working together with members and other allies, Eurodad advocates for greater transparency and enhanced coordination of taxation systems worldwide. Eurodad also works to ensure that international institutions and treaties do not constrain developing countries’ policy space on this area.
The Eurodad Tax Justice work follows a three-track approach focused on:
- Europe, with the aim of increasing transparency and preventing tax practices that facilitate tax dodging. We have a special focus on working for the adoption of an ambitious EU directive on public country by country reporting and preventing harmful tax practices in Europe.
- The global level, with an aim to influence the global tax rules and decision-making processes. Our key focus is to push for the establishment of a well-resourced, transparent intergovernmental tax commission under the United Nations (UN). We believe that this should be the place for global decision making on tax matters, as opposed to the current situation, where the decisions take place in forums led by the OECD. As part of the international work, we also follow and comment on OECD-led processes, without legitimizing them.
- Strengthening the European and global tax movement through Tax Justice Europe (TJ-E) and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ), while ensuring that GATJ remains a southern-led coalition.
Tax is not an easy issue, and people at Eurodad know this more than anyone else. We need to rehabilitate the role of government and taxation, and continue working to present a new vision of the positive role that tax plays and how central it is to creating any form of economic justice.
Philip Alston, former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights